King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  She has it now.

  The glow at the base of her skull has gone dark and cold. The sense of presence which has for so long been an integral part of her Enye MacColl-ness, is gone. She has moved beyond the outermost edge of the web of mythlines of which her consciousness is a part, into new and unfamiliar geographies.

  It strikes her with almost physical force. An end to the war, to the walls of secrecy that daily grow higher around her—the light long since shut out—an end to the schizophrenia of days riding the streets of the city on her eighteen-speed flame yellow ATB and nights stalking those same streets pursuing the spectre of unspeakable, unending violence. An end to fear, to a responsibility that is crushing the life from her like a great falling moon. To simply walk away, to be able to live and love and work and play and be human, to be the Enye MacColl Enye MacColl had always intended Enye MacColl to be. To have relationships in which she can afford to care, can afford to be spendthrift with her emotions. All by the simple act of walking away.

  And she knows, in that berth in the belly of the great ship beating across the currents of the cold northern seas, that she cannot do it. She must see it ended. She must heal the sickness once and forever so that it will never again threaten her soul. She has responsibilities. She cannot walk away.

  The late winter dawn finds her on the deck as the great white ship enters a wide estuary. Docks and piers, warehouses, lights, buoys and beacons, the monolithic flanks of bulk carriers with names like Neptune Amethyst and Trans-global Challenger. Kilometre after kilometre of cranes and piled cargo containers slide past her on the shore. White gulls hover over the white wake, raucous and greedy in the dawn light, hunting for morsels thrown to the surface by the twin screws. The air is cold and damp; it smells of sea and oil, it smells of morning. A middle-aged man in a blue track suit is jogging around the deck. Ten laps equals one kilometre. He nods to Enye each time he passes. His breath steams. They are the only two people on deck. The great white ship passes through a series of locks and moles and ties up. Police check the passengers as they disembark. Everyone from Enye’s country is automatically under suspicion. They alight on a young man with a dark complexion who has not had time to shave this morning. He looks like their idea of a terrorist. A taxi takes Enye into the city. It is still too early for the clinic to be taking bookings. She finds a café open for breakfast, which, for the people of this city, seems to consist wholly of toast. Every two minutes a waitress with a whining voice shouts “Toast’s ready!” and deposits a plate on a customer’s table. Enye eats all the toast she is capable of looking at after a midwinter sea crossing and it is still not time for the clinic to open. The address is near one of the city’s famous cathedrals. She thinks it would be silly to have been here and not seen the sights. As the first Beatles tour is not for another two hours, she opts for the cathedral.

  Immersed in drowning in embedded in: light. Rainbow coloured like God’s covenants. It might be heaven. Christ Triumphant enthroned in primal light receives the glorias of saints and seraphs casting their crowns upon the glassy sea while the dead summoned from their graves are caught up in rapture to receive beautification or damnation. Christus Omnia Vincit; the Last Trump sounds, in shafts and columns of light Michael stoops like a hawk upon the Great Worm; the pit of fire opens its maw to receive the Deceiver and those he has deceived. Light. Primal light overwhelms her. Cantos from Klopstock, the inspiration to Mahler for the final movement of his Resurrection Symphony, resound in her mind.

  Ich bin von Gott und will weider zu Gott!

  Mit Flugeln, die ich mir errungen.

  In heissem Liebesstreben,

  Werd’ich entschweben

  Zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug’ gedrungen!

  Classical Remix Kultur.

  The trumpets of resurrection reverberate as she passes from window to window: the Gates of Eden sealed and guarded with a sword of flame, the Deluge thundering down upon the unrighteous; the covenant going up at Carmel with Abraham, coming down at Sinai with Moses. Gaude te, gaude te, Christus est natus, ex Maria Virgine, gaude te. Voices join with the primal light to fill the vault. She has come at choir practice, doubly blessèd she. Signs and wonders, bread and wine, loaves and fishes, lion ox man eagle, alpha and omega, YHWH, I Am What I Am, INRI XPI.

  By the ancient lights God reveals Himself to Enye MacColl contemplating abortion. Handel now: And the Glory of the Lord. A sense of numinous awe she has not known since childhood days of Cloud-gathering enfolds her. She knows herself to have been touched by the finger of God. A tree, by being a tree, is…

  She walks from the cathedral through the wakening city down to the waterside, takes a fat, bustling ferry across the wide river, meanders with the expectant aimlessness of the true explorer about the town on the other shore; discovers delights and delicacies of Victoriana and Edwardiana; wrought-iron and glass, pavilions and piers and esplanades and boardwalks; the autumnal tranquility of a seaside resort permanently out of season. She buys ice cream from a pastel-pink clapboard booth, the sole booth open on a promenade of windswept flapping Japanese paper lanterns.

  The ferry takes her back to the city. She buys a pizza with a little of the money her mother gave her, goes to see an afternoon movie: a Polish film. The posters describe it as “The Deeply Disturbing My Bath and Hat.” She is the only member of the audience. They still run the film. Would they have run it for an audience of zero? Old Bishop Berkeley again—does The Deeply Disturbing My Bath and Hat play if there is no audience to see it?

  The early night of year’s ending falls across the city. She makes her way down to the ferry port. She cannot explain why she did what she did, why she did not do what she did not do. She had gone to the cathedral to kill time before having a foetus cut out of her with chrome-plated tools. She had not expected, much less wanted, to encounter God. She stands by the rail in the bitter cold and wind and watches the lights of the foreign city fall away behind her and become churned up with the waters of the estuary to white froth by the propellers.

  She keeps herself awake until the great white ship crosses the borderline between geographies and returns her to her familiar mindscape of mythlines. The presence, the subliminal whispers in her spirit, are familiar friends, the dim glow at the base of her consciousness the comfort of a child’s night-light that watches over sleep. She sails in with the dawn on the great white ship into the city that is her home and the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

  And if the bells ring now, they ring for the soul of Mr. Antrobus. Heigh-ho. Heigh-ho. Slipped away in the grey in-between days, heigh-ho heigh-ho. Saw too much, did Mr. Antrobus of twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street; saw the shape of the coming decade while still a formlessness on time’s horizon and knew that it would have no place in it for old, tired men with Proclivities.

  Enye would like to think he died of unrequited love, heigh-ho heigh-ho.

  Alas, poor Antrobus.

  When she had knocked and received no answer she had first thought it an old, tired man with Proclivities’s pique that she had not come on Christmas Day with her traditional gift—something warming and pourable that they could share over whatever new recording she had been given. She had spent Christmas in the house behind the green gates with her mother and her brother, to explain to them and to herself why she had done what she had done and why she had not done what she had not done. And to touch the city with her mythoconsciousness to draw out the oscillations and turbulence patterns of the Lords of the Gateway. In vain.

  After dark she had come knocking again. In vain. The scratch and wail of cats confined against their will had alerted her. She had knelt down and sniffed at the underdoor gap—adequate draught-proofing had never been one of Mr. Antrobus’s priorities. Cat shit and urine. She had called the police.

  As they broke down the door, a wave of cats bolted out and ran into L’Esperanza Street.

  One glimpse, and Enye fled upstairs.

  He was seated in his favourite chair. He was wearing head
phones. Red LED level meters danced on his radio-cassette; it was still tuned to the Final Station. The fire was dead clinker; in the hearth lay half-burned scraps of glossy poster paper. The topless towers of Ilium, burned.

  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

  On the day of the funeral, which is the penultimate day of the year, a lugubrious parade enters L’Esperanza Street. It is headed by a trio of musicians—three elderly, toothless gentlemen in crow-black suits and bowler hats making music upon accordion, sobbing clarinet, and arthritic fiddle. In time to their doleful music steps a motley bag of similarly dressed aged aged men, some adorned with black bowlers; some carrying tightly furled umbrellas, though the day has the electric blue clarity of bright winter days; some weighed down by medals they have won in a dozen campaigns in as many countries. Some wheel black bicycles as old and decrepit as themselves. One carries a Bible on a purple plush cushion trimmed with gold braid; another with white gloves and cuffs holds, upright, a naked sword. A third bears a flag; not the flag of any nation, more like the flag of a society or sodality. At the very rear, a man with his trouser legs rolled up (so much gooseflesh on such a cold, clear winter day) leads a goat on a piece of string. The parade processes with weighty dignity up L’Esperanza Street with the patient steps of aged aged men. Enye recognises the trio’s music: a stripped-bare and mutilated variation of the second movement of Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony.

  The people of L’Esperanza Street are drawn from their windows and doors to watch the parade. The children leave their plastic fantasy figures and computer games to run from their gates and gardens and fall in alongside the marchers. Their feet cannot match the rhythm of aged aged men—they are too full of impatience and energy. The parade arrives at the palings in front of number twenty-seven and arranges itself, quite naturally, without any prerehearsed signal or instruction, into a semicircle. The trio falls silent, the accompanying children also. They can sense the sacredness of the moment. The talent has not yet been educated out of them.

  Two old men in black bowler hats carry a large wreath of lilac and white flowers. Enye in the window wonders how she can have failed to see it; it is so large the two aged aged men can barely carry it, and it is not so very great a parade. Accordion, clarinet, and fiddle strike a chord. Hats are doffed, held over hearts. The wreath is laid by the side of the gate Mr. Antrobus only ever went out once, and that once horizontally. The man with the white gloves and cuffs raises his sword above his head, then brings it down smartly in front of his face. The flag is likewise raised high but the wind is too light to stir its heavy velvet folds so that its legend may be read by the people of L’Esperanza Street.

  For one minute, there is stillness and silence.

  Sword and flag are lowered, the trio resumes its abuse of Haydn, the parade reforms in the same reverent silence and, closed up by the man leading the white billy goat, proceeds on down L’Esperanza Street. A small cortege of delayed traffic has built up behind it. The expressions on the drivers’ faces are hard to define. The expressions on the faces of the people of L’Esperanza Street are hard to define. The children run back to their parents and presents; the procession is gone, a momentary diversion from the grey limbo of in-between days. The parents take them indoors to watch the Disney channel on satellite TV.

  Heigh-ho heigh-ho.

  Poor Antrobus.

  Question: Is it the last great party of the old decade, or the first great party of the new decade?

  (Truth is, the new decade doesn’t start until the Year One of any ten-year period, as one smart dick points out, only to get himself bounced by the gorillas on the door for being a pedant and party-pooper).

  Answer: Both.

  One of those magazines that likes to think it is indispensable to the street culture of the city has hired out an architecturally (and ideologically) sound warehouse down by the old docks and fitted out the entire second floor with five trucks’ worth of sound and vision. And to breathe spirit into their five-trucksful, they have hired half a dozen of the acts they think will be germinal in the next decade.

  Elliot, it would seem, is germinal.

  He thinks this sounds kind of dirty. Then he realises that the offer is in deadly sincerity, panics, and needs the combined diplomatic efforts of his work mates to prevent him from throwing all his accumulated years of equipment out his window into the street.

  All the city will be there, the magazine says.

  “God, they better not be,” says Elliot.

  The organisers think it will be good for his karma if they bestow upon him a fistful of complimentary tickets so he can at least fill the dance floor with friendly feet. One pair of which belongs to Enye. Two hours to go and she has run out of human resources to settle his nerves. Certainly, the great acoustic barn is filling by the minute with the Bryghte and the Bootiful and the Mandarins of Fashion (who are predicting that This will be The Decade When Fashion Goes Out of Fashion) and the Socially Credible. “Could you lend me one of those swords of yours so I can quietly fall on it?”

  The organisers have declared that this is to be a Theme party, though they have neglected to broadcast what the Theme is. The Theme seems to be Be Your Own Theme. Enye has come in a short hand-print yukata and a pair of black and gold shell-suit bottoms, slung her swords across her back, and rooted out a papier-mâché Kabuki mask which, at the moment, is pushed up onto her head. “Urban ninja,” she says. “Knight of the Neon Lotus.” Elliot is in combat pants, Jimi Hendrix “Are you Experienced?” T-shirt, Hawaiian shirt, and helicopter-pilot mirror shades. The My Lai look, he calls it. One forty to go and he checks and rechecks his equipment, checks and rechecks and re-rechecks. He has hired a Linn programmer and two black girls in the mandatory black leather microskirts to help him and he hasn’t seen any of them in over an hour.

  “‘Next day on your dressing room they hang a star,’” says Enye. “Me go mingle. See what’s happening out there. Back before long.” She kisses him. He tastes surprisingly good.

  She presses through the pressing bodies. The only dance possible under such degrees of overcrowding is a kind of shrug of alternate shoulders and side shuffle of alternate feet.

  “Those swords real?” asks a sweating man dressed as an Islamic fundamentalist. He is too neurally napalmed to be worthy of a reply. Enye glares at him, slips her mask down. The heat is stifling but she has privacy.

  The year ticks away.

  She recognises a face from the Deep Sea Wave of faces. It is Jaypee. She flips up her mask. Jaypee recognises her. Exchanging directional hand signals, they work their ways to a rendezvous as far as possible from the band and the bass and the back seat. Jaypee looks like a dyspeptic owl. He tends to at parties. He is miffed that no one has recognised his costume: American televangelist. “Can’t you tell from the trousers?” He shows her his handkerchief with the Four Spiritual Principles fabric-painted on it. “No one here has a sense of humour. You’re looking good, Enye.”

  “My job keeps me active.”

  “The QHPSL rumour mill grinds exceeding fine, but word up is you’re a bike girl.”

  “All stretch fabric and belt pouches, Jaypee; eighteen forward gears, no reverse, and quick release saddle.”

  “Reach out and touch the screen and be healed, sister.”

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Always first on the scene at the epicentre of the social seisms, Enye, honey. You know Jaypee. Happens the art editor of that rag that purports to be a serious contributor to the cultural health of our city and one did time together at art college. Couldn’t move for complimentaries, dear thing.”

  “And the… ah, the?”

  “Glass Menagerie? Well, they’ve assigned one a new partner. He’s here somewhere. He felt it was meet right and his bounden duty, but one managed to lose him. Amen and Amen. He’s young. He’s dynamic, he’s thrusting; he’s not you, angel.”

  “I’m touched, Jaypee.”

 
“The Blessèd Phaedra’s here somewhere, should you want to run her through with one of those wicked little swords of yours.”

  “She did me a favour.”

  “Having thigh muscles like California redwoods is a favour?”

  “Ask me that from a horizontal position.”

  “Enye, Enye, your exposure to the streets is turning you into a vulgar little gurrier.”

  “My advice to you still stands, Jaypee.”

  “Alas, dear heart, one is too great a coward to heed it. One likes one’s creature comforts. Time has made Jaypee Kinsella a great conservative. Lay hands on me, sister! I need the power of Jesus to heal me of terminal conservatism!”

  Mistah DeeJay is playing hits from the past ten years back-2-back. Sometimes you can almost weep with nostalgia.

  All changed, changed utterly.

  “See you about, Jaypee.”

  “Probably not, Enye.”

  And the conflicting currents that stir the party at the edge of the decade move them apart again.

  People and people and people cram into the second-floor warehouse. Under the FX lights, it becomes more and more like Mr. Antrobus’s personal hell. Human gravitation: through the orbiting bodies Enye is drawn to Omry, jigging disconsolately at the foot of the stage. She is dressed as ever, in the fabric of the decade. Enye wonders, is she going to change at midnight, whirl around like Wonder Woman to reveal the fabric of the next decade in all its wonder and glory? Omry’s theme is Herself.

  “Those swords real?”

  “Second person to ask that. Third person gets one run through him. Or her.”

  “Great party idea. Could I borrow them sometime?”

  “I think not. Too much spirit in these swords.”

  Omry understands this.

  “Elliot asking for you. He’s shitting blue bricks back there.”

  Elliot’s is the final set of the year. The last half hour all to himself. Fifty-five minutes to launch: how time flies.